One peculiar trend in popular music that came along in
the early sixties was dead teenager music. These songs told the
story of teenage love tragically cut short by the grim reaper. Now,
while this type of song would seem to belong in the genre of melodrama rather
than horror, they share many of the same themes that characterized horror
music of the rock 'n' roll era. One was the connection of teenage romance with
destruction. Love has the potential to be tragic, and even more of the
case in the songs dealing with suicide, love brings about tragedy.
Notably, and it's made explicit in "Ebony Eyes,"
by the Everly Brothers, and "Tell Laura I Love Her,"
by Ray Peterson, death cuts short these romances prior to marriage.
Therefore, these romances can remain in a state of eternal pre-sexual purity,
once again upholding the prohibitions against sex at that time, similar to the
prohibitions against sex in horror. In a way, death saves these loves
from being defiled by carnality, but the alternative, death, is hardly a
superior option, thus illustrating the social rules that govern behavior and
thought and lead to destruction, to horror.

Other and unnamed:

Of course, this trend was ripe for parody.
The whole concept of these songs was more than a little ridiculous. The
Cheers' "Black Denim Trousers and Motor Cycle
Boots" (1956) preceded the trend of dead teenager music that really
began with Mark Dinning's "Teen Angel"
in 1960. Thus, the concept was humorous even before it was
serious. Jimmy Cross' "I Want My Baby Back"
takes the dead teenager song to the extreme by having the speaker exhume his
dear departed girlfriend and live happily ever after with her corpse. On
one hand, this negates the notion of eternal pre-sexual purity and, on the
other, plunges the dead teenager song more fully into the horror genre with a
suggestion of necrophilia. "Leader of the Laundromat,"
by the Detergents, parodied a specific song rather than the whole trend of
music. Such parodies and answer songs were common in the rock 'n' roll
era but now are moribund, with only "Weird Al" Yankovic continuing
the tradition..